LaGrone, Joe

ORAL HISTORY OF JOE LAGRONE
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
July 29, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is July the 29th, 2011, and I am at the home of Joe LaGrone here in Oak Ridge. Mr. LaGrone, we appreciate you taking time to talk to us.
Mr. LaGrone: It’s a pleasure. Thank you very much.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me a little bit about you. That’s what I want to start out with. Tell me where you were born and something about your family, and where you were raised and went to school.
Mr. LaGrone: This could be like hitting the Hoover Dam with a sledgehammer and gush for the rest of the day, but I grew up in a rural community on the Louisiana-Texas border, on the Texas side, a community named Deadwood that was founded by my great-great-grandfather when it was a part of Mexico. And I went to a rural school and, eventually, we had a consolidated school system formed in the county, and I graduated from Carthage High School in 1957. My family farmed: we raised cotton, soybeans, peanuts, sugarcane, a variety of peas, melons, corn, feed for our stock. My father did construction work for the county, and also worked in the oilfields. My mother, my brothers and my sister and I ran the farm in between. And at age twelve, I was plowing a turning plow with horses and mules, chopping cotton, and this time of year, whenever you would see us country kids, you always knew the ones who lived on the farm because our fingers were torn up from cotton burrs, and we also had difficulty starting school because we went barefooted all summer working in the fields. And of course, they required us to wear shoes, and after the second day, we all had unimaginable blisters along the backside. But this community of Deadwood was roughly twenty-one miles from the nearest town. Everything that we ate, we either raised it in the fields, killed it in the woods, or caught it in the streams. We were very self-sufficient. Only the very basics, such as spices, salt, tea, pepper, coffee, those kinds of things did we buy at a store.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So, that was tough growing up, wasn’t it?
Mr. LaGrone: It was. We grew up in a shotgun-style house. You could stand in the front door and look out the back. It was built up off the ground because, where I grew up, it’s very, very damp; it’s swamp country, and you dare not build on the ground. So, that was also a place where hens would steal away for their nest, dogs would crawl under the house and scratch to find cool dirt, and spend the day. But, yes, those were hard times, but they were also the times that tested your timbre, made your fiber, and if you survived that, you probably could go out into the world and survive.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, I understand. Now, what year did you graduate high school?
Mr. LaGrone: I graduated May of 1957. I was barely seventeen years old. I had begun school at the rural school when I was five years old. My mother taught me to read when I was four years old using the Houston Chronicle, the old funny pages. I used to sit on her lap every day, and she would read me Maggie and Jiggs, Barnaby, Smiling Jack, Kerry Drake, Steve Canyon, and Joe Palooka, and it was a strictly sight-reading thing. My brothers and my sister would bring me books from the school, and in addition, we would read those at home at night, and so that’s how I learned to read.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, were you the youngest?
Mr. LaGrone: I was the youngest of four. I had a sister – I’m the last of my family; they’re all dead now. And then I had two brothers, and by the time I was in the eighth grade, they had all graduated from high school.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, so they were quite a bit older than you.
Mr. LaGrone: They were. I was born in 1939. My parents married in 1933. My dad had been a migrant farm worker. He rode the rails from east Texas to west Texas, where he worked in the wheat fields, but primarily the cotton fields during those years leading up to and during the Depression, and in the wintertime, he would hobo back home with the migrant farm workers and the hobos, spend the winter with a brother, Uncle Walter, making railroad ties, and he and another brother, Uncle Arthur, made whiskey.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: Yes, and of course, the whiskey making continued until I was probably twelve years old. Along with farming, Keith, we trapped. We trapped for possum, mink raccoon, fox, and a good mink hide would bring twenty to twenty-five dollars. I ran trap lines until I was in my sophomore year in junior college. Anything to make a dollar to make a living.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, and I guess all the kids kind of helped out, because I mean –
Mr. LaGrone: We all worked on the farm.
Mr. McDaniel: – it was a family issue. Right.
Mr. LaGrone: There was no question about that. We all worked, we plowed, we chopped cotton, we picked cotton, we split fence posts, we built the fences, we raised hogs, chickens, and probably one of our most favorite games, because my father was always involved in politics in one form or fashion, along with the other things that he did, was we had our own game that we called ‘Politics.’ My brothers and I claimed a third of all the hogs, dogs, cats, cows and chickens, and we set up ‘county offices,’ and each office was occupied by a hog, dog, cat, cow or chicken, and we would have elections periodically, mostly whenever we would get mad among ourselves. Being the youngest, my animals were the swing votes and would determine the outcome of the election.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, that was good training for later in life –
Mr. LaGrone: Absolutely.
Mr. McDaniel: – wasn’t it?
Mr. LaGrone: Absolutely.
Mr. McDaniel: So, you graduated high school in ’57 –
Mr. LaGrone: Correct.
Mr. McDaniel: – and so tell me what happened after that.
Mr. LaGrone: I graduated on a Monday night, and the next morning at seven o’clock, I was running a grinder at a steel plant. I really wanted to go to college and had taken the “professional course” in high school, but didn’t think it would happen because college was a rich person’s dream, and I worked for a company called J. B. Beard Steel Company in Shreveport, Louisiana. I had a brother who was working there as a welder. He taught me to weld enough so that I could help a fitter, and get off this grinder, which was killing me, even though I grew up on a farm. And by accident, my father was building a road for the local community college, met the dean of the college, whom he knew and had known his father, talked with him about me, and the dean said, “Well, if Joe Ben will come here, he can drive the school bus.” So, that was my stumbling into college.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: Exactly, and a few weeks into college, I realized a) you didn’t have to be a genius; b) that if you applied yourself you could do okay; and, shortly thereafter, the local manager of the radio station came out and announced that they had an opening for an announcer at the local radio station. So, I arranged with a cousin to drive the bus in the afternoon while I worked my duty at the radio station, and drove the bus in the morning. We made all of our toys when I grew up, and one of my favorite habits was taking my “stick” that I had, a potted meat can nailed to it and a wire running off, and I would imitate boxing matches, horse races, baseball games, football games, newscasts, all of the commentators – the Murrow’s, the Thomas’s, Ted Husing in racing, Jimmy Powers in boxing, Gordon McClendon, Red Barber, Al Helfer in baseball – and would do those complete games, take the newspaper and recreate. So, when I went down to the station and did my spiel without any script, they hired me on the spot. So for two years, while I went to college, along with driving a bus, I worked as a radio announcer, which was probably some of the best training I ever had in my life for later on in terms of public speaking, testifying in Congress, not being thrown off-topic, and being able to say, “Prior to you asking that question, Mr. Congressman, the chairman was pursuing this line of inquiry,” and so all the heads would go like this, like, “Where are you getting this?” But radio was one of the fun jobs because of the music, giving the commercials, giving the weather forecast. It was a small station, a 1,000-watt station, but it was one that covered a great area, and on Saturday afternoons, I had my own rock-and-roll request show from 1957 through 1959, and during that period of time, at the risk of a Texas brag, we had the top-rated rock-and-roll request show in the entire Arklatex during ’57 through ’59.
Mr. McDaniel: And there was a lot of rock-and-roll music in ’57 through ’59, wasn’t there?
Mr. LaGrone: Oh, this was rhythm and blues and rock-and-roll, it was the real stuff, and of course we got to see the real people who were still performing at that time – Big Joe Turner, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and I can go on and on – Bobby “Blue” Bland. We also got to see a lot of the country artists – Johnny Cash, Johnny Horton, people like that who were singing at the Louisiana Hayride before they migrated, rubbed ears on up to the Grand Ole Opry. The majority of those people who came onto the Opry – in fact, down where I grew up we said there would not have been an Opry had it not been for the Louisiana Hayride, which was a farm team, if you will, at radio station KWKH in Shreveport.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: Correct.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow. So, you worked in the radio, you went to community college for a couple years –
Mr. LaGrone: Correct.
Mr. McDaniel: – drove a bus in the mornings. So when you finished community college, what happened?
Mr. LaGrone: I went to work for the highway department repairing roads, running a jackhammer, flagging traffic, digging ditches for one dollar an hour. Again, Lincoln-esque this may sound, but I hitchhiked twenty-one miles every morning to the job, had no car, worked for one dollar an hour, and on those Texas roads on a day like today, it gets a hundred and twenty-five to a hundred and thirty degrees, and the town boys who had been hired on for summer jobs, most of them were football players, but I grew up in cotton patches and cotton fields and plowing and digging holes, so it didn’t bother me. I ate salt tablets and drank ice water, and for nine hours a day ran a jackhammer, hitchhike home in the evening and be so filthy, the only persons who would pick you up would be those people driving pulp wood trucks, no sign of a driver’s license, probably had an I.Q. that you could measure on a temperature gauge inside a house, hang onto those poles like this and watch that drive shaft in the back, you would probably get a ride.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my.
Mr. LaGrone: But I saved money, I lived on bologna sandwiches, and put aside money to go on to my next college, which was Centenary College at Shreveport, Louisiana. I did highway construction for two years, and then I went into oilfield construction work as a roustabout while I was going to Centenary, and after Centenary, before going on to graduate school.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So, tell me about going to Centenary.
Mr. LaGrone: Centenary was the best experience I had probably in college, although Panola, my community college was wonderful because that’s the place that I learned to study, met professors who led me through the process of how to study, how to take notes, and I entered Centenary, which is still probably one of the tougher academic institution in the country. It’s always rated by Newsweek, or is it –
Mr. McDaniel: U.S. News and World Report?
Mr. LaGrone: – U.S. News and World Report, thank you, as one of the top ten buys in small colleges in the country.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, and where was it? Where was it located?
Mr. LaGrone: Shreveport, Louisiana. By design, they keep the school down to eleven to twelve hundred people, and the admission standards are rather high, and to stay in school are rather high. So it was at Centenary that I really started getting into my field of interest, which was history, government, and politics and languages, and at that time I had set my course to go on to graduate school and teach modern American history and foreign affairs. I competed for and got to the national finals for a Rhodes Scholarship, missed it about that much, but the next week, I won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, which paid all of my fees, tuition, books, and gave me two-thousand dollars tax-free living expenses to the graduate school of my choice in this country.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. LaGrone: So I chose the University of Wisconsin, and that’s where I went for my graduate work. Toward the end of my master’s program, I was tired, I was burned out because I had worked all those years, two jobs most of the time. I didn’t mention I did grade papers for the history department, so anything to make a buck. I also, as you can tell from that pool table over there, I hustled a few pool tables when I needed spending money.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: So I convinced the Atomic Energy Commission to hire me as a management intern.
Mr. McDaniel: So, by the time you graduated, you were probably a little bit older than some of the students, weren’t you?
Mr. LaGrone: Actually, no, because I took a course load of eighteen hours a semester, and so I kept that busy schedule going, and I was twenty-one years old when I finished undergraduate school.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay. So, yeah, you moved ahead.
Mr. LaGrone: I plowed through my master’s program at a pace of about the same way, and at twenty-two, I was short only by writing my thesis, and it was at that time I decided I needed a break.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, exactly. So at twenty-two, you had everything done except your thesis.
Mr. LaGrone: And then I decided to go to work for the Atomic Energy Commission. The Atomic Energy Commission at that time was hiring interns around the country. They operated because of its influence from the Manhattan Engineering District days, very much like the military when it came to recruiting people that they thought would have the capability to go on and become managers at various echelons within the Atomic Energy Commission. So they went to each of the major graduate schools around the country and would end up recruiting about a hundred people, comprised of legal interns, technical interns, and management interns, and I was selected that year in 1962, and was assigned to the Albuquerque Operations Office. I spent about three years there working in contracts and procurement, decided that I needed some commercial industrial experience, because part of the deal was they expected mobility, both geographically as well as to learn other disciplines. Some people chose to remain in their home stations around the country, like Oak Ridge and all the other places. There were eight Operations Offices at the time. Albuquerque was a wonderful place and I loved it, but in order to achieve what I knew I wanted to achieve, I took a job with Eastman Kodak, worked a year in Rochester, New York as a subcontract representative on their proprietary programs managing subcontracts. Then I went back to Albuquerque for a promotion, spent another year and a half working in an entirely different set of programs. As a matter of fact, the projects I worked in for that year and a half, Keith, were the projects for the NASA programs. They were called Space Nuclear Alternative Projects. One of my projects was called SNAP-27. They were fueled by plutonium micro-spheres. Five of those are on the moon to this day.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: Armstrong and Aldrin deployed the very first one. They stand about that high. They’re attached to the leg of the LEM [Lunar Excursion Module] and then they’re deployed, and they measure solar winds, moonquakes, and all the other kinds of things that happen in outer space. All five work, and they worked so long that NASA eventually shut them down. The interesting thing is, Apollo 13, you remember the oxygen supply blew out?
Mr. McDaniel: Yes.
Mr. LaGrone: And the astronauts rode back to earth on the LEM?
Mr. McDaniel: Yes.
Mr. LaGrone: There was a SNAP-27 on the leg; it’s now in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: It’s not a problem, but it’s been there since, golly, what was that, the late ’60s or early ’70s.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah. Exactly.
Mr. LaGrone: Also, we made these radioisotope thermal-electric generators that are on weather satellites and other satellites for other government agencies that are in deep-space orbits. From there, I took a job: I wanted to work in the Atomic Energy Commission’s headquarters, because headquarters experience was essential. In those days, you did not become a manager of significance in an Operations Office without headquarters experience, and the same was true if you started in headquarters, you had to go out to the field. So in 1969, with our two-and-a-half-year-old child and our one-month-old baby, we jumped into a car and took off for Maryland, and I worked there from 1969 to 1975. While I was there, I competed for and won on a national basis a Congressional Fellowship. I worked in the Congress with the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and Congressman Craig Hosmer, who was the ranking republican on the joint committee, he was from California – I was his “guy on the committee” – and the area he had me specialize in was uranium enrichment. From there, I went back to the Atomic Energy Commission, and eventually we were transitioned into the Energy Research and Development Administration. I left Washington and went to San Francisco as an assistant manager. We had all kinds of programs in alternative energies, we had some nuclear programs, but we were principally involved in solar, wind, ocean, thermal, you name it; anything alternative, we were into it. I became the Manager of that office in 1977, and I think I was all of thirty-six years old.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: To my knowledge, I’m the youngest person, or was the youngest person to ever become a Manager of an Operations Office. You can call that luck, the good Lord’s blessings, or hard work, or a combination.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: And during that time, I was pulled into Washington for solving two other major problems that the AEC, or rather the Department of Energy by that time, had. I keep using these acronyms because we’ve been so many agencies. People, even in this town I’m sure you’ll find, still think about the AEC instead of the Department of Energy, so having grown up in that, I still have that same foible, if you will. But one of the things that I did, even here, along with the work in San Francisco, was to be brought in on special assignments to solve major problems that had nothing to do with the work that I was doing here. For one thing, I was brought in and reformed the low-income weatherization program, which was to help low-income people get their homes weatherized and save energy – stay warmer, stay cooler. We completely revamped that program, and we did this in four months. In the first year, we weatherized over a million homes, or right at a million homes, which was more than had been done in the prior six years of the history of that program.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: How did we do it? Common sense. We said, “Throw away all this stuff. Do away with all this paper. Just make these regulations about this thick.” Paper is one of the things that I dislike greatly, and I used to give this lecture here even in Oak Ridge, because the average contract will be this thick or that thick, and if you look at the regulations to implement a modern day law, it would fill this room.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: My comeback on that is this: if you take the great documents that have sustained Western history and stack them all high, and I start with the Magna Carta, and before that I go back to the New Testament and the Old Testament, then I take the Constitution and its, what, twenty-six amendments, and throw in the Gettysburg Address, put those in decent sized type, Xerox them, they would be about this tall on this table, and those have endured wars, pestilence, attempts to destroy them, and they got to us without a Xerox machine or anything else.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: And so that’s why I have this distaste about paper; I like things punchy, pithy, and to the point.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Well, obviously you do. That’s good.
Mr. LaGrone: And Secretary Hodel asked me to come to Oak Ridge in March of 1983, and I reported here in April of 1983.
Mr. McDaniel: And what was your job title here?
Mr. LaGrone: I was a manager. I came here as Manager of the Oak Ridge Operations Office. I reached the highest level that is reachable by a career federal employee, Senior Executive Service Level VI, and I managed this office for twelve years.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, so you came in ’83.
Mr. LaGrone: I came in ’83.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, and I guess there was a lot going on about the mid-’80s here, wasn’t there? Tell me about that. [laughter]
Mr. LaGrone: [laughter] Let me count the ways. But, first of all, and it really turned out to be simpler than many of us thought it might be, was Union Carbide had announced they were leaving town. They no longer wanted to operate the facilities here or up in Kentucky.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, let me break in here. In ’83, the contractor or the same contractor ran all the facilities –
Mr. LaGrone: That is correct –
Mr. McDaniel: – here in Oak Ridge.
Mr. LaGrone: – K-25, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Y-12 plant, and of course there was the Oak Ridge Associated Universities, which was a different mission, but it was here –
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: – but yes, and all of that was operated by Union Carbide, who had been here since not long after the end of World War II or just thereabouts. So there was a large competition that took place, and Martin Marietta Corporation won the contract, we had a transition period, and they came onboard. So that was one of the big things that was going on. Probably the most contentious thing that was happening were the environmental problems. A mercury problem, mercury spilled during the building of the hydrogen bomb, had bubbled to the surface. There had been a report prepared in 1977 that estimated the amount of mercury lost, and I forget the exact numbers now, so don’t hold me to it, but it was something like two-and-a-half-million pounds or thereabouts. And that report was put into a file, it was not made public, and then some scientists, out of the laboratory, doing some work out in a creek, found a variety of strange elements in this particular creek bed. A newspaper issued a Freedom of Information request for the information. That was working for many months its way through Oak Ridge and Washington, and people were sitting on classification. There was a huge argument over what is East Fork Poplar Creek, the headwaters of which began at a spring up behind Y-12. At that particular point in time, there were over two hundred and twenty un-permitted discharges into East Fork Poplar Creek headwaters. It came down to a place called New Hope Pond, which caught and bound up a lot of the sediment, but a lot of that overflowed, went into the creek, went all the way down to Kingston just before it joined the Tennessee River. But the mercury was just the tip of the iceberg. Cutting oils and cutting fluids – volatile organic compounds I think is the right name – were being dumped into waste pits, along with machine turning chips from depleted uranium. That stuff would catch on fire. They’d put a standpipe and then pour the old oil in there. At the far west end of Y-12 were four one-acre ponds called the S-3 ponds. Those had been designed early on right at the headwaters of Bear Creek, and all of the bad stuff would go in there and percolate out and eventually get into Bear Creek, and there was a place probably half the size almost of this room that was called the Blue Lagoon. You remember I mentioned New Hope Pond on this end. One of my brighter employees dubbed that No Hope Pond because nothing was living in it.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: And don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming people or the past. I’m simply stating the way things were.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly.
Mr. LaGrone: We also were not in compliance, of course, with the Clean Water Act. We were out of compliance, and the Clean Water Act is under the jurisdiction of the State of Tennessee, unless the EPA decides to pull it back. We were also not in compliance with the Clean Air Act. We were not in compliance with the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. There was a lawsuit ongoing between an organization called LEAP and Secretary Hodel. Prior to coming here, we had begun working in California, because everyone thinks everybody in California is a little crazy, we had begun working with the EPA and the State of California as if RCRA applied out in California. So we had a very nice working relationship. It was my idea to bring that relationship here. The regulators could not come on the reservation, Keith, without first calling and then being escorted. They had no security clearances, and they only saw what people wanted them to see.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: So, at that point in time, EPA Region 4 and the State of Tennessee were just about to pull the cord and say, “You guys are not going to be in business because you’re fouling this environment.” My friend in Albuquerque, we got our weapons money out of the 05 account. He thought I was overreacting, and I said, “Look, Ray, if we do not work with the State of Tennessee, we’re going to lose Y-12, and potentially part of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.” I don’t know how well that story is known, but that’s a fact. I went and I sat down, first of all, with Governor Lamar Alexander. I gave him my pledge that we were going to work hard and long to get things set on a positive course. I met with his commissioner of environment and conservation, Jim Word, and told him the same thing. I drove to Atlanta and met with the regional administrator of the EPA and told him the same thing.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, what year was this? This was probably –
Mr. LaGrone: This was in 1983.
Mr. McDaniel: – ’83, okay.
Mr. LaGrone: Yes. Out of that came working groups made up of federal employees and employees from the State of Tennessee’s regulatory body, and the same from the EPA. About four times a year, me and the heads of the EPA and Jim Word, or his equivalent, we got together and talked about how things were going and how our staffs were working together. We negotiated a consent decree that said, “By x-date, we will have this under control or be working on it. We will get x-amount of money.” Thank God I had two old friends that I had known from earlier incarnations, both on the Hill and when I managed the California office, who worked on the Senate and the House Appropriations Committee. I called them up and I said, “We don’t have any money appropriated for these kinds of things, and we’re about to get shut down. You may have to slap me on the wrist, but I want to tell you in advance, I’ve got to use some of this money to stop these problems.” They said, “Do what you’ve got to do. We’ll slap you on the wrist later,” and we did that. We didn’t even re-program that money. We just reached in the pots of money, and in the first year, Keith, we put nine water treatment facilities into the Y-12 plant so that the water that was leaving – by 1989, we had every discharge into East Fork Poplar Creek, and that was down to 22, I believe, completely permitted. We built New Hope Pond. I know there was a community down here called New Hope Pond, but my reasoning was if we’re going to build a new entrapment or embayment facility, there has to be ‘reality’ beyond ‘hope,’ so you’re looking at the guy that named that lake Reality, and we put in a whole new thing that trapped the bad actors that were getting into the creek. People like Bruce Kimmel from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Nat Reavis from Oak Ridge Research Institute, people like Bill Adams, Bob Schleman, Larry Radcliff, Bill Bibb from my organization, they organized an effort and they sampled all of East Fork Poplar Creek until it reached the Clinch River and continued right on down to the Tennessee River, where the confluence is at Kingston. We found that strontium, cesium and other things was bound up in the muck anywhere from three feet to four feet deep. As long as it was there, that would not be a problem. We decided not to mess with the mercury because once you start digging for mercury, it just runs ahead of you and we didn’t want to dig the Panama Canal through the city of Oak Ridge and spend billions of dollars and still not fix the problem.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: So, we cut a deal with Corps of Engineers, TVA, the State of Tennessee, EPA and DOE that nobody would go dredging in that river without all of us signing off, and that way there would never be a problem. But we cleaned up stacks with filters, monitors and so forth, we changed our entire method of disposing waste, we went to recycling; the list is legendary. And I will tell you the environmental movement as it’s known today and the Department of Energy started here in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1983. Bill Bibb, Bill Adams and their cohorts, and a few people like Todd Butz from Y-12, Bruce Kimmel, we developed what we called the Oak Ridge Model, and the Oak Ridge Model said the way to do cleanup is you don’t go down here and start digging in this pond; you go back to where the point source of the emission is occurring and you stop it there, then you don’t put it in the water. Secondly, you bring in universities. Third, you bring in the private sector. So we were bringing in large businesses, small businesses, minority- and women-owned businesses, and by the time 1986-1987 had rolled around, we had three thousand new jobs in this town doing environmental cleanup work. So that was the approach that we developed, and it was adopted around the country. It became known as something else, but by 1989, as Leo Duffy, the first secretary of environmental management, said in a speech at Amelia Island, “Joe LaGrone and the people at Oak Ridge were the only people who had a plan, a comprehensive plan for cleaning up and fixing their environmental problems.” And by the way, we extended that plan to Fernald, to Paducah up in Kentucky, and to Portsmouth in Ohio. If I may jump back a moment –
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: – in June of 1983, I’m sitting here one day wondering, “My God, how are we going to get through this day with all these problems?” and the phone rang – Secretary Don Hodel – and Don had been a field man. He had run the Bonneville Power Association. He was infamous for making his own phone calls. I did the same thing, but we were a lot alike. He was a shirtsleeve guy. He would put on his coat and tie if somebody important was coming in. He loved to put his things on an easel and so forth. The phone rang, and he says, “Joe, I’ve got a lot of problems.” I said, “Yes, sir, so do I.” He said, “Well, I’m going to give you another one.” He said, “I cannot run the strategic petroleum reserve from Washington.” He said, “The people here don’t know what they’re doing. There are political problems, management problems, technical problems,” and he went through the litany. He said, “Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to take it and fix it.” He said, “I want you to do your own congressional relations, work with the General Accounting Office, work with the Inspector General, keep me informed; if you need me, call me.” I never got a piece of paper. So we threw together two task forces, the principal one led by the late John Milloway, who was one of the best assistant managers I ever had. And so we threw into that thing, and by golly, you know, we reformed the strategic petroleum reserve from top to bottom.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: Not only in terms of maintenance, but how you order equipment, how you store equipment, we built better warehousing, we consolidated contracts, we got rid of old contractors who were not doing the jobs, we changed out federal management, and we made that thing hum like crazy.
[break in recording]
Mr. LaGrone: The entire safeguards and security arena, as I was mentioning, whether it be denial systems, such as guns, guards, gates and guards, was incomplete. It was woefully lacking. So, we even built our own academy out on Bear Creek Road to train the guards how to run, how to meet their physical fitness requirements, weightlifting rooms, and those kinds of things, rifle ranges for automatic weapons, et cetera, et cetera, and we developed SWAT teams.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: We also developed philosophies on what we would do with helicopters that might come over that had people in it that wanted to do inimical things. We were leaders in the Department of Energy in developing strategies for what you do once you get an intruder inside, and we built a brand new Emergency Operations Center in the Federal Building, we built carbon copies of that at K-25, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, at the Y-12 facility, at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, at Paducah, Kentucky, at Fernald, Ohio, and at Portsmouth, Ohio, so that if, overnight, you happen to be out of town, and there was always a great likelihood that the senior management or some part of it would be out of town, you walk in one, you wouldn’t know the difference. You’d go immediately to your station. So, we ran exercise upon exercise – no-notice exercises, planned exercises – we had A teams, B teams, and C teams with your pager, and so we would do mixed exercises. Part of a team would be C, B, and A. Sometimes we’d run only an A, and then we would bring in, for example, the HERT team from Quantico, the FBI. They are the best in the country. We’d go force-on-force with them. Down at Sproit at one time, because those sites are among the swamps and spread out and are susceptible to terrorists, one week we had over two thousand people involved in an exercise. We brought in members of the Delta Force who parachuted at night in an attempt to try to penetrate those sites. Some of the people in Washington thought, “This is maybe a little crazy,” but we said, “Hey, this needs to be done because the day will come.” Now, mind you, this is back in the 1980s.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: We said, “Mind you, the day will come when this country is going to be worried about these kinds of things.”
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: If you drive up to the Federal Building, there’s a lot of stuff there now, but the original well curbs I called them, the big cement jobs filled with dirt and plants, we put those up because we were fearful that someone might drive a truck bomb up there and do ultimately what was done at the Alfred P. Murrah facility in Oklahoma. I don’t claim to be a prophet, but we’d been doing these kinds of things at the Livermore Laboratory back in the 1970s, search and emergency response teams, and they were extremely cooperative, and besides that, we had periodic demonstrations involving as many as 8,000 to 9,000 people –
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. LaGrone: – who would come and march, and so we would have everybody, from the California Highway Patrol, Oakland City Police, San Francisco, and it was all under a single point of control and command.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. LaGrone: Guess what?
Mr. McDaniel: What?
Mr. LaGrone: We never had a lawsuit filed against us for excessive use of force. It was handled in a peaceful way. We brought a lot of that experience here. I want to go back for a moment to the environmental part.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: In July of 1983, then-congresswoman Marilyn Lloyd from this district, and then-congressman Al Gore, they held joint hearings here at the American Museum of Science and Energy on the environmental problems. It was a full day of hearings.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, and this was just right after you came to Oak Ridge.
Mr. LaGrone: Correct, and, as a matter of fact, some of my joking friends, because I am a prankster, they presented to me, and I have it hanging up in my office, it’s called a George Armstrong Custer Award for Timing.
Mr. McDaniel: There you go.
Mr. LaGrone: One of the things that we committed to do to Mrs. Lloyd and Mr. Gore was that we would form an outside advisory committee to look at what we were doing. The chairman of that committee was Frank Parker, Professor Parker, from the Department of Engineering at Vanderbilt University. He identified other candidates, and there were five members on that committee. They became advisors to Martin Marietta. That was the pilot for what later became the site-specific advisory boards and so forth around the country that eventually was written into law, or either cleared by the Office of Management and Budget, and I’m not sure which. I’ve been gone sixteen years, so a little bit of this gets hazy. But we cut the ruts and cut the pilot for that, as a matter of fact.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: But all of these things were going on, and on top of that there was, within the Federal Building, a need to upgrade the staff. Excellent people, some of the best people I ever worked with in my life were in that Federal Building in 1983, but what they had not had was coming up to date in modern management techniques, working as teams, as opposed to, “We have to fight.” So, we created teams, people made up of engineers, finance, budget, lawyers, and so forth, and we tried to work the problems at these lower levels so that the issues were worked there and not everything came to the top. We did delegations of authority. I said to assistant managers, “You’re making almost as much money as I am. Why aren’t you signing this? And by the way, why are we taking thirty days to move a piece of paper through a system that could be done in four to five days?” because you’ve got all these sign offs and this note and so forth. We cut down on the processing of that. We took all of the senior managers, which were like twelve or thirteen at that time, and I created a board of directors. That board of directors dealt with cross-cutting issues throughout the office, such as helping to build a budget for the entire office for programs, for support, for travel, and modernizing the office and bringing in computer equipment. There were just maybe two or three computers in that building. We created a secretarial counsel and empowered the secretaries, “You select the material that you want in your office. You select the desk that you want, how you want it arranged. Some GS-15 division director doesn’t know anything about this. You know all about that.” And, by the way, we set up training courses. We selected facilitators, probably eighteen facilitators to work throughout the organization to work with groups who were having issues. Not to go in and solve the problems, but to help them work through the processes. We increased the number of equal employment opportunity counselors. We put a huge emphasis on doing work for others. We took a program that was worth at that time fifty million dollars and in a year and a half we took it to three hundred and fifty million dollars.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. LaGrone: By 1986, we were doing almost one-half of what the entire Department of Energy was doing in small business and minority businesses and women-owned businesses.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: Some of those have been collapsed. Yes, we were.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. LaGrone: We also sent out recruiters, too, because the makeup of the workforce was not what it should be. We weren’t just trying to hire people who weren’t qualified, but we said, “Let’s go out and see what we can do if we knock on those doors of opportunity.” So we sent recruiters to Puerto Rico, recruited about ten Puerto Ricans to come to work here. Some are still here. We sent recruiters to every historically black college in the United States. We sent recruiters to women’s colleges. We hired people from those, and some are still in the Federal Building. We built a very aggressive equal employment opportunity program, not just to build the numbers, but to bring in qualified people, to bring in and create a diverse workforce that looked more like what the United States looked like. The other thing we did, some didn’t do it but others did, I came dressed to the office like this, sort of a golf shirt. If some bigwig or muckdemuck from Washington was coming in, or a governor, I’d put on a coat and tie, but my philosophy, Keith, is be comfortable. Be able to enjoy yourself. You spend more waking hours in this office than you do at home, and let’s go on a first-name basis. Don’t call me mister, don’t call me manager, call me Joe, and by the way, if you ever hear somebody saying, “The manager wants this,” pick up that phone and call me and say, “Joe, did you really ever ask for this?” You wouldn’t believe the number of times that happened.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure.
Mr. LaGrone: I declared an open-door policy, whereby anybody from this community or any community around here, or anybody connected with these plants could call me at home if they wanted to. They could call me at the office. Any employee could come in for an open-door – and it was a private situation – and discuss their issues. The same with contractor people. We also brought labor into this whole movement. Bob Kyle, who lives over here a couple of blocks away, the Atomic Trade Labor Council, he was president of that. Bob was very, very cooperative. I cannot praise him enough for coming in and helping to work safety issues. We formed a tri-partite safety council made up of the contractor, Clyde Hopkins and his people, and there’s a guy that I would praise to high heavens. I never worked with a better manager than Clyde Hopkins. I never worked with – right in that same category is Gordon Fee. They were two of the movers and the shakers that helped make this stuff happen, along with Bob Kyle. And so we would bring together this safety committee, not to work on who violated this plug in issue or that, but to talk about building the atmosphere, and how would we want to work together, and guess what? Washington tried to model a program department-wide after what we’d done here, but they were so bureaucratic, they could not –
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] They couldn’t make it happen.
Mr. LaGrone: – get it to work. They couldn’t make it work, and we sat here and laughed at them. But every week, Clyde Hopkins, Gordon Fee, and my deputy, Grover Smith, and before that, Bill Casper, we sat down, just like this, either in my office or down in Clyde’s office, no notes, and we’d talk about what’s going on, what needs to be worked on, and so forth. Once a month, Clyde and I would go to a place over here on the Kingston Pike, it used to be called the Frontier House. Some yuppies bought it and changed it and wrecked it, but it used to be one of the best hamburger joints in East Tennessee.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: Clyde and I would sit there, and we’d eat hamburgers and French fries, and drink very cold Budweiser beer, and we’d talk about the work atmosphere, how to work better together, how to help each other. We didn’t go at it, “If you look good, I’ll look bad.” We went at it on a win-win situation, “If you look bad, I look bad. How can we, as effective partners, make this the most effective place in the whole of the Department of Energy?” And so we did that, and the records will show you, if you go back and examine from 1983 to 1995, that no other Operations Office produced more, met their schedules on time, we never missed a weapons delivery, we never missed a uranium enrichment delivery, we met our milestones out at the Laboratory, we did our work at ORISE and ORAU as we should, and we also, when the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was called upon during Desert Storm, we pumped twenty-one million barrels of oil. We shipped it by barge, by rail and pipeline; we lost less than a half a barrel of oil, we delivered all of the oil, collected every penny on time, and proved to the world that it could work and it dampened the price of oil. We were death on meeting our schedules, but at the same time we didn’t try to do it ourselves with a bullwhip. We delegated and walked the plant. I spent most of my time walking the hallways in the federal building or the outlying site offices. By the way, there were no site offices when we came here in 1983. I’m not throwing off on my predecessor, but you cannot sit here in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and really know what’s going on in Paducah, Kentucky without some eyes and ears. So we set up site offices in Paducah, Portsmouth, K-25, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Y-12, and of course we already had a large project office down at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but those were the eyes and ears, plus they had authority to commit. The whole idea was “the customer is right.” If there’s a screw-up, “The government is probably at fault, let’s go fix it,” just like when some customers called in one day from – I’ll call them customers – they were residents in Paducah. They called in to say, “We’ve got a funny smell in our water,” and Jeff Bostock and I talked about that, we went over and tested, he did, had some people, and they found trichloroethylene was in the water. It had leaked. I don’t know when they built the Paducah plant, it was probably in the ’40s –
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: – early ’50s.
Mr. McDaniel: Early ’50s.
Mr. LaGrone: When they built that plant, they used a lot of – it’s cleaning fluid is what it is, trichloroethylene, washing up tools and other things. It had found its way into old, ancient stream beds and was moving through the water table out toward the Ohio River and the Cumberland River, but before it reached there, it got into some people’s water wells. I went up there and went and met with every homeowner. We took them off the water, we set up huge, plastic reservoirs, hooked them into that, offered to send anybody to the medical school of their choice for a full physical examination to find out is your health okay. We only had one lawsuit, and that was dismissed as something frivolous. But the whole point was not just go the mile and meet the regulation, go the extra mile, and that goes to something I put on that piece of paper, something I’d like to talk about, my upbringing.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: My father was a migrant farm worker, as I told you, and rode the rails. My mother was a sharecropper, never owned a home. But –
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. Yeah, hold on just a second. I want you to start over with that. Go ahead and fix –
Mr. LaGrone: Okay.
Mr. McDaniel: She’s just going to adjust your microphone. It’s rubbing a little bit.
Mr. LaGrone: I’m sorry.
Mr. McDaniel: No, that’s okay. It’s not your fault.
Mr. LaGrone: I get carried away when I start talking.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s all right.
Mr. LaGrone: All right.
Mr. McDaniel: So, your upbringing.
Mr. LaGrone: My upbringing. My father, as I mentioned to you earlier, was a migrant farm worker. He saw unspeakable social injustices done to people by railroad detectives, by bullies who rode those trains, by people who would not hire people, and he grew up a disciple of Huey Long and FDR, to be candid with you. My mother was a sharecropper. She was the third of eleven children. My dad was the twelfth of thirteen. But my mother, at age eleven, was plowing a horse and a mule like a man. She grubbed stumps, grubbed hoes. She never got to start to school till November because they picked cotton until November, and was taken out of school in March to start farming again; got to the seventh grade. But they knew what it was like to be mistreated, to not have an education, to have no advantages, and so they reared – I get emotional –
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay.
Mr. LaGrone: – when I talk about this.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s all right.
Mr. LaGrone: They reared us, “You’re as good as anyone, but you’re better than no one. You treat people the way you want to be treated.” My father, till he died, would bring a complete stranger, hobos, when I was a kid, into the house and eat –
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: – and he’d say, “Mama, wrap up something for them so they can eat it when they’re on down the road,” or people slept in our barns, and it was always a matter of, “You give it your best, you never settle for second, and you never allow anybody to intimidate you.” They didn’t know the word intimidate. They used the word, “Never let anybody buffalo you.” That was one reason I enjoyed testifying in Congress, not to go up there and challenge a senator or challenge a congressman, but because I was confident in myself. With all the speech training that I had taken through school, radio work, toastmasters, I spoke. Anywhere I got an opportunity to go give a speech, I would do it, plus imitating radio and TV announcers, and so forth. But I loved to go up there because I had done my homework. We would prepare a thirty minute statement for the record. I had worked on the Hill, and I knew no one ever got to read a thirty minute statement unless you were a cabinet officer or you were really in for a Bernie Madoff grilling, okay?
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: You’d submit that for the record. I would digest that to a ten minute statement in the event I got to testify for ten minutes. I would then do a five minute statement, I would do a three minute statement, and shortly before going on, I prepared a one minute statement, so regardless if they had a vote, you could get your punchy, pithy points in right dead, boom, boom, boom, and they knew what you were doing, they knew you had done your homework, and they respected you for that. So, that came from my parents. Every night, when we got home from school, my dad would sit roughly where you are, my mother would sit over there, and with a kerosene lamp, which is now over my daughter’s house, we would read aloud. We’d stand. We were forced to stand up and read –
Mr. McDaniel: Really?
Mr. LaGrone: – and they would criticize, or critique, how well we’re reading. Then, my father would do all the multiplication tables. They went through our homework religiously, and they would say, “Well, this is pretty good, but you can always do better.” You didn’t miss school. If you said you were sick, “Well, good. Get in the bed and stay there all day, and you only get up to go outside to the bathroom.” We didn’t have running water.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: I missed one day of school from the third through the twelfth grade, and that was because I had developed the mumps on the day we were letting out for Christmas.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: I had one brother who never missed a day of school.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. LaGrone: The other brother missed a day of school because he played hooky and hitchhiked to Shreveport to see the Yankees and the Indians play an exhibition baseball game. But that was the upbringing. It never got too tough. One day, I stretched in the cotton field, I stood up and stretched my back like this, and my father yelled across that field, “Joe boy, what are you doing?” and I said, “Papa, my back is hurting,” and he said, “Son, you don’t have a back, therefore it cannot be hurting.”
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. LaGrone: But that was the upbringing and the philosophy I tried to bring to work, not that I demanded that people didn’t have a back or stay there bleary eyed all night, but showed the willingness and did it, that I would do any job in the office, and tried to set the example. I considered myself more a leader than a manager because, to me, a leader sets the style, tone and tenor. A leader is the person who will be out there on a rainy night without an umbrella. A leader is a person who will surround himself with people who are far smarter than they are, but the leader will know how to bring that group together into a “consensus,” and we did a lot of work bringing in outside consultants and doing organization and team-building, how to solve problems, how to create win-win situations, how to understand your management styles, how you’re perceived by other people, how you interact with other people, and by the way, how you want to get along with other people. I know you’ve been in government offices or private offices where there’s always the big conference table.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: I had that removed from my office, and I set up couches and a coffee table. We were having some significant problems with EPA Region 5. The fellow who ran that office, Valdus Adamkus, later returned to his native country, Estonia, and became the president no less –
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: – but Valdus was very formal. I always tried to get him to go out to a Chicago Cub game with me and sit out in the bleachers, drink beer and eat a hot dog. I thought we’d get to know each other better.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: But he wouldn’t do that, so I said, “We need to build a team-type relationship.” I brought my whole team to Chicago. I was working on problems at Portsmouth. We had a pretty good meeting, but it was formal, and before anyone would say anything, they would look at Mr. Adamkus like this, “Is this okay to say?” So they did a return visit here. The conference room I had, we had the chairs in a circle, no table, and an easel. Well, they came in and they were trying to figure out, “Where do I sit?” and I said, “Well, you can take a chair anywhere. We’re all equal here.” I said, “The only thing we don’t have is a pass-the-walking-stick.” That absolutely blew their minds. The other thing, I’ll go back to my upbringing, we shared good news and bad news with all our employees. Every quarter, I tried to get everybody together in the American Museum of Science and Energy and talk about how things are going, what could be going better, and then we’d throw it open for questions; usually then we would have some food to eat out in the lobby. Some liked it, some probably didn’t, but that’s my style, down to earth, informal, kept to the heart of the problem, “Let’s find a way to work it, and let’s assume that you’re working in good faith, unless you demonstrate to me otherwise that you’re not working in good faith.”
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: I picked my time; I picked my place to retire. I had seen a lot of managers, Keith, who were, let’s say, over-stayers: they stayed too long. You’ve seen politicians stay too long. You’ve seen entertainers who stayed too long, or they’ll return and try to come back.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: I said, “I’ll never do that.” My objective is to do my job, and get off that horse when that horse is running at full speed, because that way I’ll pick the time and place. It’s a little dangerous, but I’ll pick the place,” because if you wait until that horse is in a fence corner, he can’t go anywhere, and everybody you’ve ever angered will come out to flail and beat you.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh sure, of course.
Mr. LaGrone: So one Sunday morning, I came out of church, I called my boss in Washington. He worked for the secretary. He had worked for me at one time on the West Coast, and I said, “Don, I’ve just left the house of the Lord, I’m not angry at anyone, but I want you to know that in one month from today, I’m going to be gone from the Department of Energy.” He said, “I guess I’m not surprised.” I said, “Okay,” and I said, “Would you please notify the secretary tomorrow?” She typically wanted you to stay six or nine months, but I knew that would make you into a lame duck. I then called the Emergency Operations Center here in Oak Ridge, and I called every senior manager and told them to be at my office, or my conference room, “At 6:30 tomorrow morning, there’s no topic, come by yourself, principals only.” So, at 6:30, all these bleary-eyed people come in and I said, “You can take notes, but I’d just as soon to ask you to pass this on by word of mouth. I am retiring, and as of May 3, I will no longer be manager of the office. Now, I want each of you to quickly go and call all of your contractor counterparts.” I turned to Jim Alexander, public affairs officer, “Go call Frank Munger, call your counterpart or his counterpart at The Oak Ridger.” I want to get the news out rapidly because I knew Washington was going to push back.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, of course.
Mr. LaGrone: Well, sure enough, at 8:30, my boss called and said, “Oh, the boss lady says you can’t leave. You’ve got to stay there six or nine months. That’s a big job. It’s going to take a long time to fill.” I said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve already announced it and everybody in town knows, and I’m not going to stay on as a lame duck.”
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: “Well she wants to know why you picked a month.” I said, “Because the first month, or the first week of that month, I will have some control over the organization. I’ll be able to lead some initiatives. The second week, the rumor mill will be saying, ‘Well, who’s going to replace LaGrone?’ The third week, I’ll be filling out forms. The fourth week, I’ll be going around saying goodbye and thank you to everyone,” and I said, “By the way, ask the secretary if she knows anything about Porter Wagoner.” He came back and said, “No, she doesn’t.” I said, “Well, tell her that he once did a song that was very big back in the late ’50s called I’ve Enjoyed As Much of This As I Can Stand,” and that’s what I did.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] Oh, yeah.
Mr. LaGrone: And that was my “story” of the Department of Energy.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. LaGrone: But I tried to operate on fairness, I went once a year, sometimes twice a year, and met with the board of directors of Martin Marietta Corporation, their entire board, and on that board were people like Melvin Laird, people like the president of Texaco, Aerospace, Garrett Air Research, and so forth, and we’d spend two hours talking about how things are going, how can things be improved. I did that deliberately, not that I didn’t trust Clyde Hopkins –
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: – but I was not going to be trapped to just working the local pea patch. I wanted to work with the top dogs and let them know the direct feedback, or “This is why your award fee score is not any higher,” or, “Here are some things that you can do, and by the way, would you please tell me some things that we or our people are doing that are causing you a problem, and let’s work our way through these things,” and it worked and it paid off. That’s probably as good a story as I can tell you, and it’s all audit-proof. I have tons of old resumes that I’ve saved downstairs, not resumes but the annual appraisals, which were about this thick of all the things that we did, but I can tell you that I do believe we did improve the work atmosphere, both in the contractor organizations, the federal organizations, we reigned in the safeguards and security problems. There still are going to be problems out there, because every time you do something, the bad guys are going to ratchet up.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: We got a start on the environmental program in terms of where we were going, what had to be done. In 1983 and 1984, I was called a ‘tree hugger.’ Well, when Secretary Watkins become the Secretary in 1990, he had a conference call and he was talking about Rocky Flats was being shut down, we had to all go find our problems and everybody took their turns, the managers talking, and when it came my turn he said, “LaGrone, what about you?” I said, “Mr. Secretary,” I said, “I have more people trying to pull me out of this tree that I’m hugging than you can shake a stick at,” and he actually broke into laughter.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: Yes. The other thing they told us that could not be built in the city of Oak Ridge was the TSCA [Toxic Substances Control Act] Incinerator. Are you familiar with that?
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah. Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: That had been lying dormant for numbers of years. We pulled that baby out, we shook it and we built it, turned it on, it worked; an original fan broke, but we put in a different fan, and it worked. The State of Tennessee approved it. We worked all those housing developments over there across the river. Who was the builder? Hart was his name.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, yeah.
Mr. LaGrone: We let them know what we were doing, why we were doing it, and they would be safe. There have been no adverse effects from that. We burned tons and tons of PCB-laden things and other cross-contaminated things, and the State of Tennessee went along with it. So, I think we made a lot of progress; we didn’t fix all the problems. We had a lot of fun, and not everybody liked it, but a lot of people did. I’d invite you to talk to some of the people in the state, like Ben Smith, who was around at that time. I don’t know if you can find Jim Word or if you can find Greer Tidwell, who lives in Nashville. Greer was the EPA Regional Administrator. But we would get, Greer, for example, and his counterpart from the state, and go to an Atlanta baseball game and talk, but that was building that trust and relationship so that when things fell apart, you knew that you were working in good faith but you just weren’t in agreement. But you had that foundation that you could always go back to, and, again, that goes back to what my mom and dad taught me years ago, “Treat people fairly, treat them the way you want to be treated, go the extra mile, and if they say you’re wrong, try to explain to them.” We sold PC to people, and if someone ordered twelve pounds of PC, we gave then thirteen pounds. My dad called it the ‘baker’s dozen.’ My mother would often say, “D, all these people fight you in politics, yet you’re so nice to them. Why do you do that?” He said, “Because the best thing to do is to kill with a smile. Let them know it’s not really bothering you, and they’re the ones who are going to have to deal with the problem.”
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Well, this was great. Thank you so much. That’s exactly what I was looking for. That was –
Mr. LaGrone: You’re welcome.
Mr. McDaniel: – it was perfect. Thank you so much.
Mr. LaGrone: Thank you.
Mr. McDaniel: And so you’ve enjoyed your retirement?
Mr. LaGrone: I’ve enjoyed my retirement. I worked for British Nuclear Fuels. I worked in England for them for a period of time. I worked in northern Virginia for them for a period of time. I worked for Lockheed Martin in another part of their sector, and then I formed my own consulting company and I kept that very active for about seven years or so, and I’ve been winding things down because I’m tired of airplanes, I’m tired of hotel food, I’m tired of hotels, they all smell the same, and besides, I’m pushing seventy-two years old – stay home and hope Congress reaches an agreement and don’t send the country into a default.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s exactly right.
Mr. LaGrone: That’s what I’m hoping.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s exactly right.
Mr. LaGrone: And I enjoy taking care of my yard, and I do a few things at church, but I have never been joiner. I’ve tried to stay beneath the radar, and one of my objectives has been keep my name out of the newspaper –
Mr. McDaniel: There you go.
Mr. LaGrone: – and I think probably the only time my name was in the paper was when they published a list of former managers, and would you believe they got the date wrong on that? [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Yeah, I would believe that. I would believe that.
Mr. LaGrone: I didn’t call anybody.
Mr. McDaniel: All right, Joe, I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Mr. LaGrone: Well, you’re entirely welcome. I appreciate you. I truly hope that this met your needs.
Mr. McDaniel: It was. It was perfect.
Mr. LaGrone: And I hope it was not too self-serving.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, no, it was perfect.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF JOE LAGRONE
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
July 29, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is July the 29th, 2011, and I am at the home of Joe LaGrone here in Oak Ridge. Mr. LaGrone, we appreciate you taking time to talk to us.
Mr. LaGrone: It’s a pleasure. Thank you very much.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me a little bit about you. That’s what I want to start out with. Tell me where you were born and something about your family, and where you were raised and went to school.
Mr. LaGrone: This could be like hitting the Hoover Dam with a sledgehammer and gush for the rest of the day, but I grew up in a rural community on the Louisiana-Texas border, on the Texas side, a community named Deadwood that was founded by my great-great-grandfather when it was a part of Mexico. And I went to a rural school and, eventually, we had a consolidated school system formed in the county, and I graduated from Carthage High School in 1957. My family farmed: we raised cotton, soybeans, peanuts, sugarcane, a variety of peas, melons, corn, feed for our stock. My father did construction work for the county, and also worked in the oilfields. My mother, my brothers and my sister and I ran the farm in between. And at age twelve, I was plowing a turning plow with horses and mules, chopping cotton, and this time of year, whenever you would see us country kids, you always knew the ones who lived on the farm because our fingers were torn up from cotton burrs, and we also had difficulty starting school because we went barefooted all summer working in the fields. And of course, they required us to wear shoes, and after the second day, we all had unimaginable blisters along the backside. But this community of Deadwood was roughly twenty-one miles from the nearest town. Everything that we ate, we either raised it in the fields, killed it in the woods, or caught it in the streams. We were very self-sufficient. Only the very basics, such as spices, salt, tea, pepper, coffee, those kinds of things did we buy at a store.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So, that was tough growing up, wasn’t it?
Mr. LaGrone: It was. We grew up in a shotgun-style house. You could stand in the front door and look out the back. It was built up off the ground because, where I grew up, it’s very, very damp; it’s swamp country, and you dare not build on the ground. So, that was also a place where hens would steal away for their nest, dogs would crawl under the house and scratch to find cool dirt, and spend the day. But, yes, those were hard times, but they were also the times that tested your timbre, made your fiber, and if you survived that, you probably could go out into the world and survive.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, I understand. Now, what year did you graduate high school?
Mr. LaGrone: I graduated May of 1957. I was barely seventeen years old. I had begun school at the rural school when I was five years old. My mother taught me to read when I was four years old using the Houston Chronicle, the old funny pages. I used to sit on her lap every day, and she would read me Maggie and Jiggs, Barnaby, Smiling Jack, Kerry Drake, Steve Canyon, and Joe Palooka, and it was a strictly sight-reading thing. My brothers and my sister would bring me books from the school, and in addition, we would read those at home at night, and so that’s how I learned to read.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, were you the youngest?
Mr. LaGrone: I was the youngest of four. I had a sister – I’m the last of my family; they’re all dead now. And then I had two brothers, and by the time I was in the eighth grade, they had all graduated from high school.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, so they were quite a bit older than you.
Mr. LaGrone: They were. I was born in 1939. My parents married in 1933. My dad had been a migrant farm worker. He rode the rails from east Texas to west Texas, where he worked in the wheat fields, but primarily the cotton fields during those years leading up to and during the Depression, and in the wintertime, he would hobo back home with the migrant farm workers and the hobos, spend the winter with a brother, Uncle Walter, making railroad ties, and he and another brother, Uncle Arthur, made whiskey.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: Yes, and of course, the whiskey making continued until I was probably twelve years old. Along with farming, Keith, we trapped. We trapped for possum, mink raccoon, fox, and a good mink hide would bring twenty to twenty-five dollars. I ran trap lines until I was in my sophomore year in junior college. Anything to make a dollar to make a living.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, and I guess all the kids kind of helped out, because I mean –
Mr. LaGrone: We all worked on the farm.
Mr. McDaniel: – it was a family issue. Right.
Mr. LaGrone: There was no question about that. We all worked, we plowed, we chopped cotton, we picked cotton, we split fence posts, we built the fences, we raised hogs, chickens, and probably one of our most favorite games, because my father was always involved in politics in one form or fashion, along with the other things that he did, was we had our own game that we called ‘Politics.’ My brothers and I claimed a third of all the hogs, dogs, cats, cows and chickens, and we set up ‘county offices,’ and each office was occupied by a hog, dog, cat, cow or chicken, and we would have elections periodically, mostly whenever we would get mad among ourselves. Being the youngest, my animals were the swing votes and would determine the outcome of the election.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, that was good training for later in life –
Mr. LaGrone: Absolutely.
Mr. McDaniel: – wasn’t it?
Mr. LaGrone: Absolutely.
Mr. McDaniel: So, you graduated high school in ’57 –
Mr. LaGrone: Correct.
Mr. McDaniel: – and so tell me what happened after that.
Mr. LaGrone: I graduated on a Monday night, and the next morning at seven o’clock, I was running a grinder at a steel plant. I really wanted to go to college and had taken the “professional course” in high school, but didn’t think it would happen because college was a rich person’s dream, and I worked for a company called J. B. Beard Steel Company in Shreveport, Louisiana. I had a brother who was working there as a welder. He taught me to weld enough so that I could help a fitter, and get off this grinder, which was killing me, even though I grew up on a farm. And by accident, my father was building a road for the local community college, met the dean of the college, whom he knew and had known his father, talked with him about me, and the dean said, “Well, if Joe Ben will come here, he can drive the school bus.” So, that was my stumbling into college.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: Exactly, and a few weeks into college, I realized a) you didn’t have to be a genius; b) that if you applied yourself you could do okay; and, shortly thereafter, the local manager of the radio station came out and announced that they had an opening for an announcer at the local radio station. So, I arranged with a cousin to drive the bus in the afternoon while I worked my duty at the radio station, and drove the bus in the morning. We made all of our toys when I grew up, and one of my favorite habits was taking my “stick” that I had, a potted meat can nailed to it and a wire running off, and I would imitate boxing matches, horse races, baseball games, football games, newscasts, all of the commentators – the Murrow’s, the Thomas’s, Ted Husing in racing, Jimmy Powers in boxing, Gordon McClendon, Red Barber, Al Helfer in baseball – and would do those complete games, take the newspaper and recreate. So, when I went down to the station and did my spiel without any script, they hired me on the spot. So for two years, while I went to college, along with driving a bus, I worked as a radio announcer, which was probably some of the best training I ever had in my life for later on in terms of public speaking, testifying in Congress, not being thrown off-topic, and being able to say, “Prior to you asking that question, Mr. Congressman, the chairman was pursuing this line of inquiry,” and so all the heads would go like this, like, “Where are you getting this?” But radio was one of the fun jobs because of the music, giving the commercials, giving the weather forecast. It was a small station, a 1,000-watt station, but it was one that covered a great area, and on Saturday afternoons, I had my own rock-and-roll request show from 1957 through 1959, and during that period of time, at the risk of a Texas brag, we had the top-rated rock-and-roll request show in the entire Arklatex during ’57 through ’59.
Mr. McDaniel: And there was a lot of rock-and-roll music in ’57 through ’59, wasn’t there?
Mr. LaGrone: Oh, this was rhythm and blues and rock-and-roll, it was the real stuff, and of course we got to see the real people who were still performing at that time – Big Joe Turner, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and I can go on and on – Bobby “Blue” Bland. We also got to see a lot of the country artists – Johnny Cash, Johnny Horton, people like that who were singing at the Louisiana Hayride before they migrated, rubbed ears on up to the Grand Ole Opry. The majority of those people who came onto the Opry – in fact, down where I grew up we said there would not have been an Opry had it not been for the Louisiana Hayride, which was a farm team, if you will, at radio station KWKH in Shreveport.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: Correct.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow. So, you worked in the radio, you went to community college for a couple years –
Mr. LaGrone: Correct.
Mr. McDaniel: – drove a bus in the mornings. So when you finished community college, what happened?
Mr. LaGrone: I went to work for the highway department repairing roads, running a jackhammer, flagging traffic, digging ditches for one dollar an hour. Again, Lincoln-esque this may sound, but I hitchhiked twenty-one miles every morning to the job, had no car, worked for one dollar an hour, and on those Texas roads on a day like today, it gets a hundred and twenty-five to a hundred and thirty degrees, and the town boys who had been hired on for summer jobs, most of them were football players, but I grew up in cotton patches and cotton fields and plowing and digging holes, so it didn’t bother me. I ate salt tablets and drank ice water, and for nine hours a day ran a jackhammer, hitchhike home in the evening and be so filthy, the only persons who would pick you up would be those people driving pulp wood trucks, no sign of a driver’s license, probably had an I.Q. that you could measure on a temperature gauge inside a house, hang onto those poles like this and watch that drive shaft in the back, you would probably get a ride.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my.
Mr. LaGrone: But I saved money, I lived on bologna sandwiches, and put aside money to go on to my next college, which was Centenary College at Shreveport, Louisiana. I did highway construction for two years, and then I went into oilfield construction work as a roustabout while I was going to Centenary, and after Centenary, before going on to graduate school.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So, tell me about going to Centenary.
Mr. LaGrone: Centenary was the best experience I had probably in college, although Panola, my community college was wonderful because that’s the place that I learned to study, met professors who led me through the process of how to study, how to take notes, and I entered Centenary, which is still probably one of the tougher academic institution in the country. It’s always rated by Newsweek, or is it –
Mr. McDaniel: U.S. News and World Report?
Mr. LaGrone: – U.S. News and World Report, thank you, as one of the top ten buys in small colleges in the country.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, and where was it? Where was it located?
Mr. LaGrone: Shreveport, Louisiana. By design, they keep the school down to eleven to twelve hundred people, and the admission standards are rather high, and to stay in school are rather high. So it was at Centenary that I really started getting into my field of interest, which was history, government, and politics and languages, and at that time I had set my course to go on to graduate school and teach modern American history and foreign affairs. I competed for and got to the national finals for a Rhodes Scholarship, missed it about that much, but the next week, I won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, which paid all of my fees, tuition, books, and gave me two-thousand dollars tax-free living expenses to the graduate school of my choice in this country.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. LaGrone: So I chose the University of Wisconsin, and that’s where I went for my graduate work. Toward the end of my master’s program, I was tired, I was burned out because I had worked all those years, two jobs most of the time. I didn’t mention I did grade papers for the history department, so anything to make a buck. I also, as you can tell from that pool table over there, I hustled a few pool tables when I needed spending money.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: So I convinced the Atomic Energy Commission to hire me as a management intern.
Mr. McDaniel: So, by the time you graduated, you were probably a little bit older than some of the students, weren’t you?
Mr. LaGrone: Actually, no, because I took a course load of eighteen hours a semester, and so I kept that busy schedule going, and I was twenty-one years old when I finished undergraduate school.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay. So, yeah, you moved ahead.
Mr. LaGrone: I plowed through my master’s program at a pace of about the same way, and at twenty-two, I was short only by writing my thesis, and it was at that time I decided I needed a break.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, exactly. So at twenty-two, you had everything done except your thesis.
Mr. LaGrone: And then I decided to go to work for the Atomic Energy Commission. The Atomic Energy Commission at that time was hiring interns around the country. They operated because of its influence from the Manhattan Engineering District days, very much like the military when it came to recruiting people that they thought would have the capability to go on and become managers at various echelons within the Atomic Energy Commission. So they went to each of the major graduate schools around the country and would end up recruiting about a hundred people, comprised of legal interns, technical interns, and management interns, and I was selected that year in 1962, and was assigned to the Albuquerque Operations Office. I spent about three years there working in contracts and procurement, decided that I needed some commercial industrial experience, because part of the deal was they expected mobility, both geographically as well as to learn other disciplines. Some people chose to remain in their home stations around the country, like Oak Ridge and all the other places. There were eight Operations Offices at the time. Albuquerque was a wonderful place and I loved it, but in order to achieve what I knew I wanted to achieve, I took a job with Eastman Kodak, worked a year in Rochester, New York as a subcontract representative on their proprietary programs managing subcontracts. Then I went back to Albuquerque for a promotion, spent another year and a half working in an entirely different set of programs. As a matter of fact, the projects I worked in for that year and a half, Keith, were the projects for the NASA programs. They were called Space Nuclear Alternative Projects. One of my projects was called SNAP-27. They were fueled by plutonium micro-spheres. Five of those are on the moon to this day.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: Armstrong and Aldrin deployed the very first one. They stand about that high. They’re attached to the leg of the LEM [Lunar Excursion Module] and then they’re deployed, and they measure solar winds, moonquakes, and all the other kinds of things that happen in outer space. All five work, and they worked so long that NASA eventually shut them down. The interesting thing is, Apollo 13, you remember the oxygen supply blew out?
Mr. McDaniel: Yes.
Mr. LaGrone: And the astronauts rode back to earth on the LEM?
Mr. McDaniel: Yes.
Mr. LaGrone: There was a SNAP-27 on the leg; it’s now in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: It’s not a problem, but it’s been there since, golly, what was that, the late ’60s or early ’70s.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah. Exactly.
Mr. LaGrone: Also, we made these radioisotope thermal-electric generators that are on weather satellites and other satellites for other government agencies that are in deep-space orbits. From there, I took a job: I wanted to work in the Atomic Energy Commission’s headquarters, because headquarters experience was essential. In those days, you did not become a manager of significance in an Operations Office without headquarters experience, and the same was true if you started in headquarters, you had to go out to the field. So in 1969, with our two-and-a-half-year-old child and our one-month-old baby, we jumped into a car and took off for Maryland, and I worked there from 1969 to 1975. While I was there, I competed for and won on a national basis a Congressional Fellowship. I worked in the Congress with the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and Congressman Craig Hosmer, who was the ranking republican on the joint committee, he was from California – I was his “guy on the committee” – and the area he had me specialize in was uranium enrichment. From there, I went back to the Atomic Energy Commission, and eventually we were transitioned into the Energy Research and Development Administration. I left Washington and went to San Francisco as an assistant manager. We had all kinds of programs in alternative energies, we had some nuclear programs, but we were principally involved in solar, wind, ocean, thermal, you name it; anything alternative, we were into it. I became the Manager of that office in 1977, and I think I was all of thirty-six years old.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: To my knowledge, I’m the youngest person, or was the youngest person to ever become a Manager of an Operations Office. You can call that luck, the good Lord’s blessings, or hard work, or a combination.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: And during that time, I was pulled into Washington for solving two other major problems that the AEC, or rather the Department of Energy by that time, had. I keep using these acronyms because we’ve been so many agencies. People, even in this town I’m sure you’ll find, still think about the AEC instead of the Department of Energy, so having grown up in that, I still have that same foible, if you will. But one of the things that I did, even here, along with the work in San Francisco, was to be brought in on special assignments to solve major problems that had nothing to do with the work that I was doing here. For one thing, I was brought in and reformed the low-income weatherization program, which was to help low-income people get their homes weatherized and save energy – stay warmer, stay cooler. We completely revamped that program, and we did this in four months. In the first year, we weatherized over a million homes, or right at a million homes, which was more than had been done in the prior six years of the history of that program.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: How did we do it? Common sense. We said, “Throw away all this stuff. Do away with all this paper. Just make these regulations about this thick.” Paper is one of the things that I dislike greatly, and I used to give this lecture here even in Oak Ridge, because the average contract will be this thick or that thick, and if you look at the regulations to implement a modern day law, it would fill this room.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: My comeback on that is this: if you take the great documents that have sustained Western history and stack them all high, and I start with the Magna Carta, and before that I go back to the New Testament and the Old Testament, then I take the Constitution and its, what, twenty-six amendments, and throw in the Gettysburg Address, put those in decent sized type, Xerox them, they would be about this tall on this table, and those have endured wars, pestilence, attempts to destroy them, and they got to us without a Xerox machine or anything else.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: And so that’s why I have this distaste about paper; I like things punchy, pithy, and to the point.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Well, obviously you do. That’s good.
Mr. LaGrone: And Secretary Hodel asked me to come to Oak Ridge in March of 1983, and I reported here in April of 1983.
Mr. McDaniel: And what was your job title here?
Mr. LaGrone: I was a manager. I came here as Manager of the Oak Ridge Operations Office. I reached the highest level that is reachable by a career federal employee, Senior Executive Service Level VI, and I managed this office for twelve years.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, so you came in ’83.
Mr. LaGrone: I came in ’83.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, and I guess there was a lot going on about the mid-’80s here, wasn’t there? Tell me about that. [laughter]
Mr. LaGrone: [laughter] Let me count the ways. But, first of all, and it really turned out to be simpler than many of us thought it might be, was Union Carbide had announced they were leaving town. They no longer wanted to operate the facilities here or up in Kentucky.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, let me break in here. In ’83, the contractor or the same contractor ran all the facilities –
Mr. LaGrone: That is correct –
Mr. McDaniel: – here in Oak Ridge.
Mr. LaGrone: – K-25, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Y-12 plant, and of course there was the Oak Ridge Associated Universities, which was a different mission, but it was here –
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: – but yes, and all of that was operated by Union Carbide, who had been here since not long after the end of World War II or just thereabouts. So there was a large competition that took place, and Martin Marietta Corporation won the contract, we had a transition period, and they came onboard. So that was one of the big things that was going on. Probably the most contentious thing that was happening were the environmental problems. A mercury problem, mercury spilled during the building of the hydrogen bomb, had bubbled to the surface. There had been a report prepared in 1977 that estimated the amount of mercury lost, and I forget the exact numbers now, so don’t hold me to it, but it was something like two-and-a-half-million pounds or thereabouts. And that report was put into a file, it was not made public, and then some scientists, out of the laboratory, doing some work out in a creek, found a variety of strange elements in this particular creek bed. A newspaper issued a Freedom of Information request for the information. That was working for many months its way through Oak Ridge and Washington, and people were sitting on classification. There was a huge argument over what is East Fork Poplar Creek, the headwaters of which began at a spring up behind Y-12. At that particular point in time, there were over two hundred and twenty un-permitted discharges into East Fork Poplar Creek headwaters. It came down to a place called New Hope Pond, which caught and bound up a lot of the sediment, but a lot of that overflowed, went into the creek, went all the way down to Kingston just before it joined the Tennessee River. But the mercury was just the tip of the iceberg. Cutting oils and cutting fluids – volatile organic compounds I think is the right name – were being dumped into waste pits, along with machine turning chips from depleted uranium. That stuff would catch on fire. They’d put a standpipe and then pour the old oil in there. At the far west end of Y-12 were four one-acre ponds called the S-3 ponds. Those had been designed early on right at the headwaters of Bear Creek, and all of the bad stuff would go in there and percolate out and eventually get into Bear Creek, and there was a place probably half the size almost of this room that was called the Blue Lagoon. You remember I mentioned New Hope Pond on this end. One of my brighter employees dubbed that No Hope Pond because nothing was living in it.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: And don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming people or the past. I’m simply stating the way things were.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly.
Mr. LaGrone: We also were not in compliance, of course, with the Clean Water Act. We were out of compliance, and the Clean Water Act is under the jurisdiction of the State of Tennessee, unless the EPA decides to pull it back. We were also not in compliance with the Clean Air Act. We were not in compliance with the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. There was a lawsuit ongoing between an organization called LEAP and Secretary Hodel. Prior to coming here, we had begun working in California, because everyone thinks everybody in California is a little crazy, we had begun working with the EPA and the State of California as if RCRA applied out in California. So we had a very nice working relationship. It was my idea to bring that relationship here. The regulators could not come on the reservation, Keith, without first calling and then being escorted. They had no security clearances, and they only saw what people wanted them to see.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: So, at that point in time, EPA Region 4 and the State of Tennessee were just about to pull the cord and say, “You guys are not going to be in business because you’re fouling this environment.” My friend in Albuquerque, we got our weapons money out of the 05 account. He thought I was overreacting, and I said, “Look, Ray, if we do not work with the State of Tennessee, we’re going to lose Y-12, and potentially part of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.” I don’t know how well that story is known, but that’s a fact. I went and I sat down, first of all, with Governor Lamar Alexander. I gave him my pledge that we were going to work hard and long to get things set on a positive course. I met with his commissioner of environment and conservation, Jim Word, and told him the same thing. I drove to Atlanta and met with the regional administrator of the EPA and told him the same thing.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, what year was this? This was probably –
Mr. LaGrone: This was in 1983.
Mr. McDaniel: – ’83, okay.
Mr. LaGrone: Yes. Out of that came working groups made up of federal employees and employees from the State of Tennessee’s regulatory body, and the same from the EPA. About four times a year, me and the heads of the EPA and Jim Word, or his equivalent, we got together and talked about how things were going and how our staffs were working together. We negotiated a consent decree that said, “By x-date, we will have this under control or be working on it. We will get x-amount of money.” Thank God I had two old friends that I had known from earlier incarnations, both on the Hill and when I managed the California office, who worked on the Senate and the House Appropriations Committee. I called them up and I said, “We don’t have any money appropriated for these kinds of things, and we’re about to get shut down. You may have to slap me on the wrist, but I want to tell you in advance, I’ve got to use some of this money to stop these problems.” They said, “Do what you’ve got to do. We’ll slap you on the wrist later,” and we did that. We didn’t even re-program that money. We just reached in the pots of money, and in the first year, Keith, we put nine water treatment facilities into the Y-12 plant so that the water that was leaving – by 1989, we had every discharge into East Fork Poplar Creek, and that was down to 22, I believe, completely permitted. We built New Hope Pond. I know there was a community down here called New Hope Pond, but my reasoning was if we’re going to build a new entrapment or embayment facility, there has to be ‘reality’ beyond ‘hope,’ so you’re looking at the guy that named that lake Reality, and we put in a whole new thing that trapped the bad actors that were getting into the creek. People like Bruce Kimmel from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Nat Reavis from Oak Ridge Research Institute, people like Bill Adams, Bob Schleman, Larry Radcliff, Bill Bibb from my organization, they organized an effort and they sampled all of East Fork Poplar Creek until it reached the Clinch River and continued right on down to the Tennessee River, where the confluence is at Kingston. We found that strontium, cesium and other things was bound up in the muck anywhere from three feet to four feet deep. As long as it was there, that would not be a problem. We decided not to mess with the mercury because once you start digging for mercury, it just runs ahead of you and we didn’t want to dig the Panama Canal through the city of Oak Ridge and spend billions of dollars and still not fix the problem.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: So, we cut a deal with Corps of Engineers, TVA, the State of Tennessee, EPA and DOE that nobody would go dredging in that river without all of us signing off, and that way there would never be a problem. But we cleaned up stacks with filters, monitors and so forth, we changed our entire method of disposing waste, we went to recycling; the list is legendary. And I will tell you the environmental movement as it’s known today and the Department of Energy started here in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1983. Bill Bibb, Bill Adams and their cohorts, and a few people like Todd Butz from Y-12, Bruce Kimmel, we developed what we called the Oak Ridge Model, and the Oak Ridge Model said the way to do cleanup is you don’t go down here and start digging in this pond; you go back to where the point source of the emission is occurring and you stop it there, then you don’t put it in the water. Secondly, you bring in universities. Third, you bring in the private sector. So we were bringing in large businesses, small businesses, minority- and women-owned businesses, and by the time 1986-1987 had rolled around, we had three thousand new jobs in this town doing environmental cleanup work. So that was the approach that we developed, and it was adopted around the country. It became known as something else, but by 1989, as Leo Duffy, the first secretary of environmental management, said in a speech at Amelia Island, “Joe LaGrone and the people at Oak Ridge were the only people who had a plan, a comprehensive plan for cleaning up and fixing their environmental problems.” And by the way, we extended that plan to Fernald, to Paducah up in Kentucky, and to Portsmouth in Ohio. If I may jump back a moment –
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: – in June of 1983, I’m sitting here one day wondering, “My God, how are we going to get through this day with all these problems?” and the phone rang – Secretary Don Hodel – and Don had been a field man. He had run the Bonneville Power Association. He was infamous for making his own phone calls. I did the same thing, but we were a lot alike. He was a shirtsleeve guy. He would put on his coat and tie if somebody important was coming in. He loved to put his things on an easel and so forth. The phone rang, and he says, “Joe, I’ve got a lot of problems.” I said, “Yes, sir, so do I.” He said, “Well, I’m going to give you another one.” He said, “I cannot run the strategic petroleum reserve from Washington.” He said, “The people here don’t know what they’re doing. There are political problems, management problems, technical problems,” and he went through the litany. He said, “Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to take it and fix it.” He said, “I want you to do your own congressional relations, work with the General Accounting Office, work with the Inspector General, keep me informed; if you need me, call me.” I never got a piece of paper. So we threw together two task forces, the principal one led by the late John Milloway, who was one of the best assistant managers I ever had. And so we threw into that thing, and by golly, you know, we reformed the strategic petroleum reserve from top to bottom.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: Not only in terms of maintenance, but how you order equipment, how you store equipment, we built better warehousing, we consolidated contracts, we got rid of old contractors who were not doing the jobs, we changed out federal management, and we made that thing hum like crazy.
[break in recording]
Mr. LaGrone: The entire safeguards and security arena, as I was mentioning, whether it be denial systems, such as guns, guards, gates and guards, was incomplete. It was woefully lacking. So, we even built our own academy out on Bear Creek Road to train the guards how to run, how to meet their physical fitness requirements, weightlifting rooms, and those kinds of things, rifle ranges for automatic weapons, et cetera, et cetera, and we developed SWAT teams.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: We also developed philosophies on what we would do with helicopters that might come over that had people in it that wanted to do inimical things. We were leaders in the Department of Energy in developing strategies for what you do once you get an intruder inside, and we built a brand new Emergency Operations Center in the Federal Building, we built carbon copies of that at K-25, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, at the Y-12 facility, at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, at Paducah, Kentucky, at Fernald, Ohio, and at Portsmouth, Ohio, so that if, overnight, you happen to be out of town, and there was always a great likelihood that the senior management or some part of it would be out of town, you walk in one, you wouldn’t know the difference. You’d go immediately to your station. So, we ran exercise upon exercise – no-notice exercises, planned exercises – we had A teams, B teams, and C teams with your pager, and so we would do mixed exercises. Part of a team would be C, B, and A. Sometimes we’d run only an A, and then we would bring in, for example, the HERT team from Quantico, the FBI. They are the best in the country. We’d go force-on-force with them. Down at Sproit at one time, because those sites are among the swamps and spread out and are susceptible to terrorists, one week we had over two thousand people involved in an exercise. We brought in members of the Delta Force who parachuted at night in an attempt to try to penetrate those sites. Some of the people in Washington thought, “This is maybe a little crazy,” but we said, “Hey, this needs to be done because the day will come.” Now, mind you, this is back in the 1980s.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: We said, “Mind you, the day will come when this country is going to be worried about these kinds of things.”
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: If you drive up to the Federal Building, there’s a lot of stuff there now, but the original well curbs I called them, the big cement jobs filled with dirt and plants, we put those up because we were fearful that someone might drive a truck bomb up there and do ultimately what was done at the Alfred P. Murrah facility in Oklahoma. I don’t claim to be a prophet, but we’d been doing these kinds of things at the Livermore Laboratory back in the 1970s, search and emergency response teams, and they were extremely cooperative, and besides that, we had periodic demonstrations involving as many as 8,000 to 9,000 people –
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. LaGrone: – who would come and march, and so we would have everybody, from the California Highway Patrol, Oakland City Police, San Francisco, and it was all under a single point of control and command.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. LaGrone: Guess what?
Mr. McDaniel: What?
Mr. LaGrone: We never had a lawsuit filed against us for excessive use of force. It was handled in a peaceful way. We brought a lot of that experience here. I want to go back for a moment to the environmental part.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: In July of 1983, then-congresswoman Marilyn Lloyd from this district, and then-congressman Al Gore, they held joint hearings here at the American Museum of Science and Energy on the environmental problems. It was a full day of hearings.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, and this was just right after you came to Oak Ridge.
Mr. LaGrone: Correct, and, as a matter of fact, some of my joking friends, because I am a prankster, they presented to me, and I have it hanging up in my office, it’s called a George Armstrong Custer Award for Timing.
Mr. McDaniel: There you go.
Mr. LaGrone: One of the things that we committed to do to Mrs. Lloyd and Mr. Gore was that we would form an outside advisory committee to look at what we were doing. The chairman of that committee was Frank Parker, Professor Parker, from the Department of Engineering at Vanderbilt University. He identified other candidates, and there were five members on that committee. They became advisors to Martin Marietta. That was the pilot for what later became the site-specific advisory boards and so forth around the country that eventually was written into law, or either cleared by the Office of Management and Budget, and I’m not sure which. I’ve been gone sixteen years, so a little bit of this gets hazy. But we cut the ruts and cut the pilot for that, as a matter of fact.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: But all of these things were going on, and on top of that there was, within the Federal Building, a need to upgrade the staff. Excellent people, some of the best people I ever worked with in my life were in that Federal Building in 1983, but what they had not had was coming up to date in modern management techniques, working as teams, as opposed to, “We have to fight.” So, we created teams, people made up of engineers, finance, budget, lawyers, and so forth, and we tried to work the problems at these lower levels so that the issues were worked there and not everything came to the top. We did delegations of authority. I said to assistant managers, “You’re making almost as much money as I am. Why aren’t you signing this? And by the way, why are we taking thirty days to move a piece of paper through a system that could be done in four to five days?” because you’ve got all these sign offs and this note and so forth. We cut down on the processing of that. We took all of the senior managers, which were like twelve or thirteen at that time, and I created a board of directors. That board of directors dealt with cross-cutting issues throughout the office, such as helping to build a budget for the entire office for programs, for support, for travel, and modernizing the office and bringing in computer equipment. There were just maybe two or three computers in that building. We created a secretarial counsel and empowered the secretaries, “You select the material that you want in your office. You select the desk that you want, how you want it arranged. Some GS-15 division director doesn’t know anything about this. You know all about that.” And, by the way, we set up training courses. We selected facilitators, probably eighteen facilitators to work throughout the organization to work with groups who were having issues. Not to go in and solve the problems, but to help them work through the processes. We increased the number of equal employment opportunity counselors. We put a huge emphasis on doing work for others. We took a program that was worth at that time fifty million dollars and in a year and a half we took it to three hundred and fifty million dollars.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. LaGrone: By 1986, we were doing almost one-half of what the entire Department of Energy was doing in small business and minority businesses and women-owned businesses.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: Some of those have been collapsed. Yes, we were.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. LaGrone: We also sent out recruiters, too, because the makeup of the workforce was not what it should be. We weren’t just trying to hire people who weren’t qualified, but we said, “Let’s go out and see what we can do if we knock on those doors of opportunity.” So we sent recruiters to Puerto Rico, recruited about ten Puerto Ricans to come to work here. Some are still here. We sent recruiters to every historically black college in the United States. We sent recruiters to women’s colleges. We hired people from those, and some are still in the Federal Building. We built a very aggressive equal employment opportunity program, not just to build the numbers, but to bring in qualified people, to bring in and create a diverse workforce that looked more like what the United States looked like. The other thing we did, some didn’t do it but others did, I came dressed to the office like this, sort of a golf shirt. If some bigwig or muckdemuck from Washington was coming in, or a governor, I’d put on a coat and tie, but my philosophy, Keith, is be comfortable. Be able to enjoy yourself. You spend more waking hours in this office than you do at home, and let’s go on a first-name basis. Don’t call me mister, don’t call me manager, call me Joe, and by the way, if you ever hear somebody saying, “The manager wants this,” pick up that phone and call me and say, “Joe, did you really ever ask for this?” You wouldn’t believe the number of times that happened.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure.
Mr. LaGrone: I declared an open-door policy, whereby anybody from this community or any community around here, or anybody connected with these plants could call me at home if they wanted to. They could call me at the office. Any employee could come in for an open-door – and it was a private situation – and discuss their issues. The same with contractor people. We also brought labor into this whole movement. Bob Kyle, who lives over here a couple of blocks away, the Atomic Trade Labor Council, he was president of that. Bob was very, very cooperative. I cannot praise him enough for coming in and helping to work safety issues. We formed a tri-partite safety council made up of the contractor, Clyde Hopkins and his people, and there’s a guy that I would praise to high heavens. I never worked with a better manager than Clyde Hopkins. I never worked with – right in that same category is Gordon Fee. They were two of the movers and the shakers that helped make this stuff happen, along with Bob Kyle. And so we would bring together this safety committee, not to work on who violated this plug in issue or that, but to talk about building the atmosphere, and how would we want to work together, and guess what? Washington tried to model a program department-wide after what we’d done here, but they were so bureaucratic, they could not –
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] They couldn’t make it happen.
Mr. LaGrone: – get it to work. They couldn’t make it work, and we sat here and laughed at them. But every week, Clyde Hopkins, Gordon Fee, and my deputy, Grover Smith, and before that, Bill Casper, we sat down, just like this, either in my office or down in Clyde’s office, no notes, and we’d talk about what’s going on, what needs to be worked on, and so forth. Once a month, Clyde and I would go to a place over here on the Kingston Pike, it used to be called the Frontier House. Some yuppies bought it and changed it and wrecked it, but it used to be one of the best hamburger joints in East Tennessee.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: Clyde and I would sit there, and we’d eat hamburgers and French fries, and drink very cold Budweiser beer, and we’d talk about the work atmosphere, how to work better together, how to help each other. We didn’t go at it, “If you look good, I’ll look bad.” We went at it on a win-win situation, “If you look bad, I look bad. How can we, as effective partners, make this the most effective place in the whole of the Department of Energy?” And so we did that, and the records will show you, if you go back and examine from 1983 to 1995, that no other Operations Office produced more, met their schedules on time, we never missed a weapons delivery, we never missed a uranium enrichment delivery, we met our milestones out at the Laboratory, we did our work at ORISE and ORAU as we should, and we also, when the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was called upon during Desert Storm, we pumped twenty-one million barrels of oil. We shipped it by barge, by rail and pipeline; we lost less than a half a barrel of oil, we delivered all of the oil, collected every penny on time, and proved to the world that it could work and it dampened the price of oil. We were death on meeting our schedules, but at the same time we didn’t try to do it ourselves with a bullwhip. We delegated and walked the plant. I spent most of my time walking the hallways in the federal building or the outlying site offices. By the way, there were no site offices when we came here in 1983. I’m not throwing off on my predecessor, but you cannot sit here in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and really know what’s going on in Paducah, Kentucky without some eyes and ears. So we set up site offices in Paducah, Portsmouth, K-25, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Y-12, and of course we already had a large project office down at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but those were the eyes and ears, plus they had authority to commit. The whole idea was “the customer is right.” If there’s a screw-up, “The government is probably at fault, let’s go fix it,” just like when some customers called in one day from – I’ll call them customers – they were residents in Paducah. They called in to say, “We’ve got a funny smell in our water,” and Jeff Bostock and I talked about that, we went over and tested, he did, had some people, and they found trichloroethylene was in the water. It had leaked. I don’t know when they built the Paducah plant, it was probably in the ’40s –
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: – early ’50s.
Mr. McDaniel: Early ’50s.
Mr. LaGrone: When they built that plant, they used a lot of – it’s cleaning fluid is what it is, trichloroethylene, washing up tools and other things. It had found its way into old, ancient stream beds and was moving through the water table out toward the Ohio River and the Cumberland River, but before it reached there, it got into some people’s water wells. I went up there and went and met with every homeowner. We took them off the water, we set up huge, plastic reservoirs, hooked them into that, offered to send anybody to the medical school of their choice for a full physical examination to find out is your health okay. We only had one lawsuit, and that was dismissed as something frivolous. But the whole point was not just go the mile and meet the regulation, go the extra mile, and that goes to something I put on that piece of paper, something I’d like to talk about, my upbringing.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: My father was a migrant farm worker, as I told you, and rode the rails. My mother was a sharecropper, never owned a home. But –
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. Yeah, hold on just a second. I want you to start over with that. Go ahead and fix –
Mr. LaGrone: Okay.
Mr. McDaniel: She’s just going to adjust your microphone. It’s rubbing a little bit.
Mr. LaGrone: I’m sorry.
Mr. McDaniel: No, that’s okay. It’s not your fault.
Mr. LaGrone: I get carried away when I start talking.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s all right.
Mr. LaGrone: All right.
Mr. McDaniel: So, your upbringing.
Mr. LaGrone: My upbringing. My father, as I mentioned to you earlier, was a migrant farm worker. He saw unspeakable social injustices done to people by railroad detectives, by bullies who rode those trains, by people who would not hire people, and he grew up a disciple of Huey Long and FDR, to be candid with you. My mother was a sharecropper. She was the third of eleven children. My dad was the twelfth of thirteen. But my mother, at age eleven, was plowing a horse and a mule like a man. She grubbed stumps, grubbed hoes. She never got to start to school till November because they picked cotton until November, and was taken out of school in March to start farming again; got to the seventh grade. But they knew what it was like to be mistreated, to not have an education, to have no advantages, and so they reared – I get emotional –
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay.
Mr. LaGrone: – when I talk about this.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s all right.
Mr. LaGrone: They reared us, “You’re as good as anyone, but you’re better than no one. You treat people the way you want to be treated.” My father, till he died, would bring a complete stranger, hobos, when I was a kid, into the house and eat –
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: – and he’d say, “Mama, wrap up something for them so they can eat it when they’re on down the road,” or people slept in our barns, and it was always a matter of, “You give it your best, you never settle for second, and you never allow anybody to intimidate you.” They didn’t know the word intimidate. They used the word, “Never let anybody buffalo you.” That was one reason I enjoyed testifying in Congress, not to go up there and challenge a senator or challenge a congressman, but because I was confident in myself. With all the speech training that I had taken through school, radio work, toastmasters, I spoke. Anywhere I got an opportunity to go give a speech, I would do it, plus imitating radio and TV announcers, and so forth. But I loved to go up there because I had done my homework. We would prepare a thirty minute statement for the record. I had worked on the Hill, and I knew no one ever got to read a thirty minute statement unless you were a cabinet officer or you were really in for a Bernie Madoff grilling, okay?
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: You’d submit that for the record. I would digest that to a ten minute statement in the event I got to testify for ten minutes. I would then do a five minute statement, I would do a three minute statement, and shortly before going on, I prepared a one minute statement, so regardless if they had a vote, you could get your punchy, pithy points in right dead, boom, boom, boom, and they knew what you were doing, they knew you had done your homework, and they respected you for that. So, that came from my parents. Every night, when we got home from school, my dad would sit roughly where you are, my mother would sit over there, and with a kerosene lamp, which is now over my daughter’s house, we would read aloud. We’d stand. We were forced to stand up and read –
Mr. McDaniel: Really?
Mr. LaGrone: – and they would criticize, or critique, how well we’re reading. Then, my father would do all the multiplication tables. They went through our homework religiously, and they would say, “Well, this is pretty good, but you can always do better.” You didn’t miss school. If you said you were sick, “Well, good. Get in the bed and stay there all day, and you only get up to go outside to the bathroom.” We didn’t have running water.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: I missed one day of school from the third through the twelfth grade, and that was because I had developed the mumps on the day we were letting out for Christmas.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: I had one brother who never missed a day of school.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. LaGrone: The other brother missed a day of school because he played hooky and hitchhiked to Shreveport to see the Yankees and the Indians play an exhibition baseball game. But that was the upbringing. It never got too tough. One day, I stretched in the cotton field, I stood up and stretched my back like this, and my father yelled across that field, “Joe boy, what are you doing?” and I said, “Papa, my back is hurting,” and he said, “Son, you don’t have a back, therefore it cannot be hurting.”
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. LaGrone: But that was the upbringing and the philosophy I tried to bring to work, not that I demanded that people didn’t have a back or stay there bleary eyed all night, but showed the willingness and did it, that I would do any job in the office, and tried to set the example. I considered myself more a leader than a manager because, to me, a leader sets the style, tone and tenor. A leader is the person who will be out there on a rainy night without an umbrella. A leader is a person who will surround himself with people who are far smarter than they are, but the leader will know how to bring that group together into a “consensus,” and we did a lot of work bringing in outside consultants and doing organization and team-building, how to solve problems, how to create win-win situations, how to understand your management styles, how you’re perceived by other people, how you interact with other people, and by the way, how you want to get along with other people. I know you’ve been in government offices or private offices where there’s always the big conference table.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: I had that removed from my office, and I set up couches and a coffee table. We were having some significant problems with EPA Region 5. The fellow who ran that office, Valdus Adamkus, later returned to his native country, Estonia, and became the president no less –
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: – but Valdus was very formal. I always tried to get him to go out to a Chicago Cub game with me and sit out in the bleachers, drink beer and eat a hot dog. I thought we’d get to know each other better.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: But he wouldn’t do that, so I said, “We need to build a team-type relationship.” I brought my whole team to Chicago. I was working on problems at Portsmouth. We had a pretty good meeting, but it was formal, and before anyone would say anything, they would look at Mr. Adamkus like this, “Is this okay to say?” So they did a return visit here. The conference room I had, we had the chairs in a circle, no table, and an easel. Well, they came in and they were trying to figure out, “Where do I sit?” and I said, “Well, you can take a chair anywhere. We’re all equal here.” I said, “The only thing we don’t have is a pass-the-walking-stick.” That absolutely blew their minds. The other thing, I’ll go back to my upbringing, we shared good news and bad news with all our employees. Every quarter, I tried to get everybody together in the American Museum of Science and Energy and talk about how things are going, what could be going better, and then we’d throw it open for questions; usually then we would have some food to eat out in the lobby. Some liked it, some probably didn’t, but that’s my style, down to earth, informal, kept to the heart of the problem, “Let’s find a way to work it, and let’s assume that you’re working in good faith, unless you demonstrate to me otherwise that you’re not working in good faith.”
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: I picked my time; I picked my place to retire. I had seen a lot of managers, Keith, who were, let’s say, over-stayers: they stayed too long. You’ve seen politicians stay too long. You’ve seen entertainers who stayed too long, or they’ll return and try to come back.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: I said, “I’ll never do that.” My objective is to do my job, and get off that horse when that horse is running at full speed, because that way I’ll pick the time and place. It’s a little dangerous, but I’ll pick the place,” because if you wait until that horse is in a fence corner, he can’t go anywhere, and everybody you’ve ever angered will come out to flail and beat you.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh sure, of course.
Mr. LaGrone: So one Sunday morning, I came out of church, I called my boss in Washington. He worked for the secretary. He had worked for me at one time on the West Coast, and I said, “Don, I’ve just left the house of the Lord, I’m not angry at anyone, but I want you to know that in one month from today, I’m going to be gone from the Department of Energy.” He said, “I guess I’m not surprised.” I said, “Okay,” and I said, “Would you please notify the secretary tomorrow?” She typically wanted you to stay six or nine months, but I knew that would make you into a lame duck. I then called the Emergency Operations Center here in Oak Ridge, and I called every senior manager and told them to be at my office, or my conference room, “At 6:30 tomorrow morning, there’s no topic, come by yourself, principals only.” So, at 6:30, all these bleary-eyed people come in and I said, “You can take notes, but I’d just as soon to ask you to pass this on by word of mouth. I am retiring, and as of May 3, I will no longer be manager of the office. Now, I want each of you to quickly go and call all of your contractor counterparts.” I turned to Jim Alexander, public affairs officer, “Go call Frank Munger, call your counterpart or his counterpart at The Oak Ridger.” I want to get the news out rapidly because I knew Washington was going to push back.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, of course.
Mr. LaGrone: Well, sure enough, at 8:30, my boss called and said, “Oh, the boss lady says you can’t leave. You’ve got to stay there six or nine months. That’s a big job. It’s going to take a long time to fill.” I said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve already announced it and everybody in town knows, and I’m not going to stay on as a lame duck.”
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: “Well she wants to know why you picked a month.” I said, “Because the first month, or the first week of that month, I will have some control over the organization. I’ll be able to lead some initiatives. The second week, the rumor mill will be saying, ‘Well, who’s going to replace LaGrone?’ The third week, I’ll be filling out forms. The fourth week, I’ll be going around saying goodbye and thank you to everyone,” and I said, “By the way, ask the secretary if she knows anything about Porter Wagoner.” He came back and said, “No, she doesn’t.” I said, “Well, tell her that he once did a song that was very big back in the late ’50s called I’ve Enjoyed As Much of This As I Can Stand,” and that’s what I did.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] Oh, yeah.
Mr. LaGrone: And that was my “story” of the Department of Energy.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. LaGrone: But I tried to operate on fairness, I went once a year, sometimes twice a year, and met with the board of directors of Martin Marietta Corporation, their entire board, and on that board were people like Melvin Laird, people like the president of Texaco, Aerospace, Garrett Air Research, and so forth, and we’d spend two hours talking about how things are going, how can things be improved. I did that deliberately, not that I didn’t trust Clyde Hopkins –
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. LaGrone: – but I was not going to be trapped to just working the local pea patch. I wanted to work with the top dogs and let them know the direct feedback, or “This is why your award fee score is not any higher,” or, “Here are some things that you can do, and by the way, would you please tell me some things that we or our people are doing that are causing you a problem, and let’s work our way through these things,” and it worked and it paid off. That’s probably as good a story as I can tell you, and it’s all audit-proof. I have tons of old resumes that I’ve saved downstairs, not resumes but the annual appraisals, which were about this thick of all the things that we did, but I can tell you that I do believe we did improve the work atmosphere, both in the contractor organizations, the federal organizations, we reigned in the safeguards and security problems. There still are going to be problems out there, because every time you do something, the bad guys are going to ratchet up.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: We got a start on the environmental program in terms of where we were going, what had to be done. In 1983 and 1984, I was called a ‘tree hugger.’ Well, when Secretary Watkins become the Secretary in 1990, he had a conference call and he was talking about Rocky Flats was being shut down, we had to all go find our problems and everybody took their turns, the managers talking, and when it came my turn he said, “LaGrone, what about you?” I said, “Mr. Secretary,” I said, “I have more people trying to pull me out of this tree that I’m hugging than you can shake a stick at,” and he actually broke into laughter.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. LaGrone: Yes. The other thing they told us that could not be built in the city of Oak Ridge was the TSCA [Toxic Substances Control Act] Incinerator. Are you familiar with that?
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah. Sure.
Mr. LaGrone: That had been lying dormant for numbers of years. We pulled that baby out, we shook it and we built it, turned it on, it worked; an original fan broke, but we put in a different fan, and it worked. The State of Tennessee approved it. We worked all those housing developments over there across the river. Who was the builder? Hart was his name.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, yeah.
Mr. LaGrone: We let them know what we were doing, why we were doing it, and they would be safe. There have been no adverse effects from that. We burned tons and tons of PCB-laden things and other cross-contaminated things, and the State of Tennessee went along with it. So, I think we made a lot of progress; we didn’t fix all the problems. We had a lot of fun, and not everybody liked it, but a lot of people did. I’d invite you to talk to some of the people in the state, like Ben Smith, who was around at that time. I don’t know if you can find Jim Word or if you can find Greer Tidwell, who lives in Nashville. Greer was the EPA Regional Administrator. But we would get, Greer, for example, and his counterpart from the state, and go to an Atlanta baseball game and talk, but that was building that trust and relationship so that when things fell apart, you knew that you were working in good faith but you just weren’t in agreement. But you had that foundation that you could always go back to, and, again, that goes back to what my mom and dad taught me years ago, “Treat people fairly, treat them the way you want to be treated, go the extra mile, and if they say you’re wrong, try to explain to them.” We sold PC to people, and if someone ordered twelve pounds of PC, we gave then thirteen pounds. My dad called it the ‘baker’s dozen.’ My mother would often say, “D, all these people fight you in politics, yet you’re so nice to them. Why do you do that?” He said, “Because the best thing to do is to kill with a smile. Let them know it’s not really bothering you, and they’re the ones who are going to have to deal with the problem.”
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Well, this was great. Thank you so much. That’s exactly what I was looking for. That was –
Mr. LaGrone: You’re welcome.
Mr. McDaniel: – it was perfect. Thank you so much.
Mr. LaGrone: Thank you.
Mr. McDaniel: And so you’ve enjoyed your retirement?
Mr. LaGrone: I’ve enjoyed my retirement. I worked for British Nuclear Fuels. I worked in England for them for a period of time. I worked in northern Virginia for them for a period of time. I worked for Lockheed Martin in another part of their sector, and then I formed my own consulting company and I kept that very active for about seven years or so, and I’ve been winding things down because I’m tired of airplanes, I’m tired of hotel food, I’m tired of hotels, they all smell the same, and besides, I’m pushing seventy-two years old – stay home and hope Congress reaches an agreement and don’t send the country into a default.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s exactly right.
Mr. LaGrone: That’s what I’m hoping.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s exactly right.
Mr. LaGrone: And I enjoy taking care of my yard, and I do a few things at church, but I have never been joiner. I’ve tried to stay beneath the radar, and one of my objectives has been keep my name out of the newspaper –
Mr. McDaniel: There you go.
Mr. LaGrone: – and I think probably the only time my name was in the paper was when they published a list of former managers, and would you believe they got the date wrong on that? [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Yeah, I would believe that. I would believe that.
Mr. LaGrone: I didn’t call anybody.
Mr. McDaniel: All right, Joe, I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Mr. LaGrone: Well, you’re entirely welcome. I appreciate you. I truly hope that this met your needs.
Mr. McDaniel: It was. It was perfect.
Mr. LaGrone: And I hope it was not too self-serving.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, no, it was perfect.
[end of recording]